Latest Posts

• Book of the Week: Good to Great

  What does it take to make a good company, great? Jim Collins and his research team spent 5 years to find out. Good to Great was published in 2001, before the financial crisis of 2008. At the end of each chapter, there is a helpful summary. The things that make companies great should be something that transcends time periods. The Companies Jim and team developed some stringent criteria based on the stock performance of publicly traded companies to identify the great companies. The 11 companies that made the cut are Abbott Laboratories (ABT), Circuit City Stores, Fannie Mae (FNMA), Gillette Company, Kimberly-Clark (KMB), Kroger (KR), Nucor (NUE), Philip Morris (PM), Pitney Bowes (PBI), Walgreens (WAG) and Wells Fargo (WFC). Fannie Mae is surprising, because their greatness caused the financial crisis due to the creation of mortgage-backed securities and trying to manage risk with them. Gillette merged with Proctor and Gamble (PG), who was painted as a nemesis in the book. Circuit City went bankrupt. Greatness doesn’t always last. The topic of maintaining greatness is covered in Jim’s other book, Built to Last. Level 5

• Book of the Week: Flash Boys

  This week I read Flash Boys by Michael Lewis to find out that I’ve been getting screwed in the stock market this entire time. The book seems like an advertisement of IEX, whose value proposition is that they don’t screw you like everyone else. Milliseconds Thousandth’s of a second matter in the high frequency trading world. If you put it a buy order, it gets routed to several exchanges. Someone who gets information and conducts trades faster than you will buy the shares at a lower price and sell it back to you at a higher price since your order will hit one exchange before it hits the other exchanges. One way to prevent this is to add delays such that your orders hit all exchanges simultaneously or trade on exchange only. Due to some laws and the size of the order, you will probably have to hit multiple exchanges to fulfill your order. High frequency traders will do anything to get an edge like physically putting their computers closer to the exchanges. Small Shops vs Big Banks Big banks suck at high frequency trading, which is dominated by companies most people haven’t heard of. Wall street people are bullshit their way to the top. The problem is that they start believing themselves. Part of bullshitting is to bluff to keep people in the dark about their own value and your own weakness. Everyone is out to screw each other so they can make a buck at your expense. Money can only buy so much. If you want to get good people, you need to appeal with them with something other than money. The people who can do that are leaders. They can convince people to give up stability and comfort to join them in the trenches. Russian Mafia Turns out many high frequency coders are Russians who can code well and know how to work the system. Wall Street is all about working the system to your advantage. A lot of the things that banks and exchanges do are to give high frequency traders more of an advantage. High frequency trading converts information to money without taking any risk. They only have to worry about other high frequency trading companies beating them to the punch. IEX The characters in the story form IEX, an exchange designed not to screw the investor. You follow them on their journey of putting the pieces together to find out how investors are getting screwed to getting IEX to be successful. I wonder if I should ask my broker to route all my trades through IEX now.

• Book of the Week: The Lean Startup

  I try to practice lean startup methodologies, but I have never read the book behind it. This week, it was time to correct that oversight by reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, an entrepreneur who has navigated through failure to success. The lean startup method takes a scientific approach to creating a successful company through validated learning. Minimum Viable Product

• Book of the Week: The Knowledge

  When All Hell Breaks Lose covers surviving the initial days after a catastrophic emergency, but I want more than to just survive. I want to be able to rebuild a civilization. Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch goes through the thought experiment of the necessary steps and leaps that one would need to make to rebuild. What shortcuts can we take and what is the bare minimum it takes to get something going again? Chemistry I like the chemistry sections, where he explains how you can extract certain compounds and how you can combine those compounds to do useful things. Like using wood ash and fat to make soap or making ammonia by fermenting pots of piss. Or how to make gunpowder. I wonder why I wasn’t taught chemistry in this fashion. Historical The historical information was also interesting. Like how René Laennec invented the stethoscope, because he was uneasy about pressing his ear and check agains the chest of a buxom woman. Or how wars were fought over islands for their guano. Shit was valuable, because it was hard to get nitrogen in usable form before the invention of the Haber-Bosch process. It is hard to imagine having such a large population without that process. You probably won’t be able to rebuild the world after reading this book, but serves as a guide post to reflect on how we got to where we are as a civilization and the things we take for granted.

• Book of the Week: Lonely Planet Road Trip California Highway 1

  This week I decided to read Road Trip California Highway 1 from Lonely Planet in preparation of my road trip. This book was published in October 2003, so it is a little dated. There was a blurb about the best bookstores. I’d bet money that half of those bookstores do not exist anymore. I found myself wanting more information. There are only bits and pieces of outdated information in the book. For food stuff, I can just pull out a smartphone and check out yelp at the spur of the moment. The only thing I found useful was the price comparison of places of lodgings. It listed places where I can setup a tent for cheap. Another thing of interest is how the ticket prices have doubled in the last decade. We are spoiled by having all this information at our finger tips. Back in the days, people just bought a book and drove. Someone people just drove. After I finished reading the book, I was not any closer to planning my road trip. Maybe a road trip isn’t something you plan, but something you just do. Time to hit the road.

• Book of the Week: Maus

  I found out about Maus from reading lists of top graphic novels. After reading it, I can definitely see why Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for it. The subject matter is heavy. The book is about a comic artist’s relationship with his dad who survived Auschwitz. He asks his dad about how he survived as a Jew during World World II in Poland. I would put this book in the same ballpark as Schindler’s List. The writing is great, I kept wanting to read page after page. I didn’t pay attention to the art style as much as I did to the words. Usually people like reading about happy things, but I can’t really say it made me as sad and depressed as an account of the Holocaust could have. It is a much more human story. Maus is worth reading as a reminder. People complain about having 1st world problems. After reading Maus, I think it is hard for anyone to complain about even 3rd world problems. If you’re alive, you already have it pretty good.

• Book of the Week: When All Hell Break Loose

  This week I read When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need to Survive When Disaster Strikes by Cody Lundin, a survival expert. I learned about Cody Lundin from watching the Discovery Channel’s Dual Survival. The premise of the show is that two survival experts with different philosophies will go through survival scenarios, such as being lost in the jungle or ship capsizing on a deserted island. Most of the drama in the show is from the conflicting philosophies. Cody is the hippy, eat grubs and insects kind of guy. The other survival expert is the build traps, kill animal, take risks type of person. From watching the show, you can tell that Cody is a person who practices what he teaches. I learned a lot about starting fires from watching him on the show. That was enough motivation to read his book. People have this romanticized ideal of camping and living off the land. Living off the land sucks and is really hard. Most people would be dead if they were forced to live off the land. This book deals with that reality. The first part of the book is about the mental game. The second part of the book is about actually doing stuff about keeping warm, securing food, making water potable, sanitation, lighting, cooking, first-aid, etc. There’s useful information, like using newspaper for insulation to keep warm. Although, I already learned that trick from homeless people in San Francisco. I’m not one of those doomsayers who stock up on ammunition, but I have been through the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. One has to be prepared for the next disaster. This book is a reminder to get my preparation in order. Those interested in survival manuals might also want to check out US Army Survival Manual: FM 21-76. The book was okay. I’d rather watch Dual Survival and go camping instead.

• Books for Entrepreneurs

  Here are some books for people who want to start companies. Real books, none of the touchy feely crap. Read these books and your business will have a better chance at succeeding, because you’ll be focusing your time working on the right problems.

• Books for Computer Scientist

  Here are some books that are useful for new hires to read. It makes it easier to convey thoughts and ideas if everyone is on the same page.

• Book of the Week: Moby Dick

  I decided to read Moby Dick months ago, but it has been a long and arduous journey. One that I do not wish to continue for the time being. The quest for Moby Dick has caused me to suffer and slip in other subject areas. When I started reading the book, I didn’t know it was ridiculously long. I kept flipping through pages on my Kindle, but the progress bar barely moved after a few days. Moby Dick written in a time when books were a primary form of entertainment. It amazes me that a person can just make up enough stuff to fill all those pages. Moby Dick seems to be one of those books that everyone knows is about crazy Captain Ahab going after a white whale, but few people have actually read. When I started reading the book, the white whale and captain were no where to be found. So far, the book is definitely interesting. The Kindle is useful to look up Hebrew and seafaring words. This is one of those books that you need to read on a week long vacation to read. I’m putting it off till I get one of those. The white whale still eludes me.

• Book of the Week: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

  

• Book of the Week: The Bootstrapper's Bible

  This week I read the pdf version of the The Bootstrapper’s Bible by Seth Godin. It was a quick and “free for two weeks until December 30th”. Note that it is April 5th 2014 today.